The bottom line
On January 15, 2026, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel issued a formal opinion concluding that 18 U.S.C. § 1715, the nearly century-old federal prohibition on mailing handguns through the U.S. Postal Service, violates the Second Amendment. The Department will no longer prosecute, enforce, or defend the statute. This is the first time in American history that the executive branch has formally declared a federal gun control law unconstitutional. That sentence needs to sit with you for a moment.
This article is based on commentary from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. Commentary, not legal advice.
What the law actually says and where it came from
18 U.S.C. § 1715 has been on the books since 1927. The plain text of the statute reads that “pistols, revolvers, and other firearms capable of being concealed on the person are nonmailable and shall not be deposited in or carried by the mails or delivered by any officer or employee of the Postal Service.” Violating it carries up to two years in federal prison.
For nearly a hundred years, this statute sat there almost entirely without challenge. It applied to unlicensed private citizens and meant that if you needed to ship a handgun, you had to use a licensed FFL dealer routing through a private carrier. You could not drop it in a USPS box, hand it to a postal worker, or ship it directly to another private individual, even in states where such a transfer would be completely legal. If you wanted to send your grandmother’s revolver to your cousin across the country, the postal service was off limits. You were a criminal the moment it crossed that threshold.
The 1927 origin matters. That was the same era producing the Volstead Act, the Sullivan Law in New York, and a general wave of Progressive-era restrictions that treated citizen access to arms as a public nuisance to be managed rather than a right to be protected. The historical record from that period does not reflect a careful constitutional balancing act. It reflects legislators who did not think the Second Amendment imposed serious limits on what they could do.
How the OLC tore it apart
The Office of Legal Counsel’s January 15 memo subjects § 1715 to the Bruen framework, and it does not survive contact with that test. Under Bruen, the government bears the burden of demonstrating that a firearm regulation is consistent with the historical tradition of firearm regulation in this country at the founding. Not vaguely similar. Not analogous in spirit. Rooted in actual historical tradition.
The OLC went looking for historical precedent that would support a general prohibition on transporting constitutionally protected arms through a postal system. They found nothing. The memo states plainly: “We did not find any relevant historical tradition of generally prohibiting the shipment of constitutionally protected arms.”
That’s the whole game right there. If the tradition doesn’t exist, the law doesn’t survive. The Bruen framework put that burden on the government and the government’s own lawyers just told the government it cannot meet it.
The memo also makes a point that I think is underappreciated in the coverage this story has gotten. Restricting the transportability of a firearm is, in the OLC’s analysis, a per se infringement on the Second Amendment. You don’t just have a right to own a handgun. You have a right to meaningfully exercise that ownership, which includes moving the firearm around. A rule that makes one major transportation channel categorically off limits to private citizens for a class of arms the Supreme Court has called among the most protected, specifically handguns, cannot stand. The OLC didn’t need to hunt for a narrow technical defect. The law’s purpose was to suppress a protected right. That’s not something Bruen allows the government to do without grounding it in tradition, and there is no tradition here.
I want to be honest about Pam Bondi
I am not a Pam Bondi defender. I’ve been consistent about this. She supported red flag laws as Florida Attorney General. She supported the Florida ban on handgun purchases by 18-to-20-year-olds that passed after Parkland. She backed open carry restrictions. By any honest measure, Pam Bondi is not a principled Second Amendment supporter, and I don’t think the record from her time in Florida can be explained away.
But I’m also not going to let that bias prevent me from crediting something genuinely historic when it happens. The person who has been driving the Second Amendment agenda inside DOJ is Harmeet Dhillon, the Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. Under that division sits the Second Amendment portfolio, and Dhillon has been running it like someone who actually cares about the outcome. She filed amicus briefs in the Massachusetts handgun roster case. Her team is engaged on Wolford v. Lopez at the Supreme Court, the Hawaii carry case challenging the so-called vampire rule that says you need explicit permission from property owners before carrying on their premises. This OLC opinion is part of a deliberate strategy, not an accident, and Dhillon has been explicit about that strategy publicly.
The strategy is methodical: identify the regulations that are most legally vulnerable under Bruen, knock them out one at a time, build precedent, and work toward harder targets. § 1715 was low-hanging fruit. The historical record was clean against it, the Bruen analysis was straightforward, and a century of non-enforcement normalized its existence without actually validating its constitutionality. Taking it out was the right call and frankly an easy one once you actually apply the correct legal framework.
Why the precedent matters more than the regulation itself
Let me tell you what this actually means beyond the practical effect of being able to mail handguns through the post office, which is fine and useful, but not the headline.
The headline is that the executive branch of the United States government has now formally concluded that a federal gun control statute cannot be squared with the Second Amendment. That has never happened. For a hundred years, the DOJ’s institutional posture was to defend federal gun laws, full stop. The assumption baked into every prosecution and every regulatory defense was that Congress had the authority to do what it did when it passed these statutes, that the Second Amendment did not meaningfully constrain that authority, and that the DOJ’s job was to win cases, not to audit the constitutional validity of the laws it was enforcing.
That posture is now broken. The OLC memo cites longstanding executive branch authority to decline enforcing statutes the executive concludes are unconstitutional. That authority is real and well established. What’s new is that the DOJ has now applied it to a gun control statute. Once you’ve done it once, you’ve acknowledged you can do it again. The question is which federal gun law gets the same analysis next.
I’ve said for years that I thought a serious challenge to the National Firearms Act was probably a decade away. The NFA’s core provisions, the $200 tax stamps, the suppressor registry, the short-barreled rifle classifications, the machine gun ban under the Hughes Amendment, rest on a legal architecture that doesn’t fare much better under Bruen than § 1715 did. The historical record for treating suppressors as dangerous contraband requiring federal registration is thin. The record for the specific features-based distinctions in the NFA is even thinner.
A DOJ that has already concluded one federal gun law is unconstitutional has no principled basis for refusing to apply the same analysis to the NFA. I’m not saying the current administration is about to gut the NFA. I’m saying the conceptual barrier to doing so just got significantly lower, and the people inside the DOJ making these calls are clearly aware of that. This opens a door that has never been open before.
The historical amnesia problem
One thing that strikes me about this story is that § 1715 survived as long as it did largely through inertia. Nobody important was prosecuted under it frequently enough to generate sustained litigation. FFLs routed around it. Private sellers used FedEx and UPS. The law was an inconvenience that most people didn’t notice because most people weren’t trying to ship handguns through the post office anyway.
That’s exactly how a lot of gun control law operates. It doesn’t survive scrutiny under honest constitutional analysis. It survives because nobody is forced to scrutinize it. The courts don’t see it. The OLC doesn’t analyze it. Legislatures don’t revisit it. It just sits there being enforced against people who don’t have the resources to mount a serious constitutional challenge, and the broader Second Amendment community never notices because the direct impact on most gun owners day-to-day is minimal.
Bruen changed that calculus because it imposed a specific affirmative burden on the government. The government has to prove tradition. The government can’t just say “reasonable regulation” and expect deference. When you start systematically asking whether any given gun law can pass that test, you find out that a lot of them cannot.
The OLC just ran that test on § 1715 and the statute failed completely. There are other statutes that would fail the same test if someone ran it. The question now is who runs the test next and on which law.
What I want to see happen from here
The practical immediate effect is simple: USPS updates its rules to permit shipment of handguns and other protected firearms by private citizens consistent with all applicable state laws. FFLs benefit from this. Private parties in states with legal private transfers benefit from this. Collectors benefit from this. That’s all straightforwardly good.
Beyond that, I want the DOJ to publish a comprehensive review of federal firearms statutes under the Bruen framework. If the standard is historical tradition and the OLC has now committed to applying it honestly, there should be a systematic review, not a case-by-case reaction whenever a specific statute happens to attract attention. The ad hoc approach means the politically inconvenient statutes get analyzed last, if at all.
The Hughes Amendment is sitting there. The suppressor registry is sitting there. The 922(g) framework with its firearms disability categories has portions that are being actively challenged in circuit courts right now. The DOJ doesn’t have to wait for the courts to force the issue. It can do what it just did with § 1715: run the test, publish the result, and decline to enforce what cannot be defended.
I’ve been following this since I was a teenager and I have genuinely never seen this day before. The day the federal government’s own lawyers admitted that a federal gun law violated the Constitution. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.
Get the Weekly Briefing
New analysis delivered every week. Court decisions, case updates, and expert commentary.